


Date At The End Of The World

by msfox



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Dystopia, End of the World, Eventual Happy Ending, F/F, Femslash, Femslash February, in sequel, not exactly a happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-03
Updated: 2017-04-03
Packaged: 2018-10-14 14:50:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10538697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msfox/pseuds/msfox
Summary: A month ago a piece of the old North State was cut off from the rest. Caite knows more about it than her mother thinks, but she pretends she doesn't. She twists what she knows into mutterings, making monsters out of the scientists and doctors because it's easier than anything else. They make it easy, too, by wearing long black beaks and coke bottle glasses. They would have been laughable if they hadn't said, 'cut this town off,' and been listened to.





	


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            A month ago a piece of the old North State was cut off from the rest. Caite knows more about it than her mother thinks, but she pretends she doesn't. She twists what she knows into mutterings, making monsters out of the scientists and doctors because it's easier than anything else. They make it easy, too, by wearing long black beaks and coke bottle glasses. They would have been laughable if they hadn't said, ' _cut this town off_ ,' and been listened to.

            "They are doctors," Her mother says from the couch. She's wavered from stalking the news stations and turning the TV off whenever Caite comes into view. Most of the time Caite just braces herself against the hallway wall and lets the bad news waft over her. It's better than staying in the dark. "It doesn't matter what they're wearing. They're only people."

            Caite sniffs, rubs the crook of her elbow against her nose, and checks for blood. Clean. Always clean. The doctors said they weren't. They claimed it'd be days before the outbreak took hold and spread all across town. Her nose curls with her lips under a smattering of dark freckles. "No they aren't."

            The doctors weren't who they said anymore, Caite was sure. Whatever lived under the heavy cloaks, whatever once looked out of the tinted lenses, whatever smelled behind the elongated cloth noses that exuded the scent of mint, orange rind, and rose--was no longer a person. A person wouldn't be able to sentence a town to death and leave in the morning.

            There was a vicious, wild, tint to Caite that wanted to scream, and kick, and spit in their faces. There was a part of her that wanted to scream for hours because everyone at school knew what was happening when the power started to flicker a week ago.

            The first time it turned off, it didn't come back on for an hour. So much for carrying on per normal. When the school bell rang early, there was nothing but a smothering quiet on all their faces. _What will we do?_ It asked, _What will happen to us_?

            The news spelled it out the way their parents wouldn't, let the dark reality creep into the fringes of their eyes. The power flicking off meant everything on TV was real even if no one they knew was sick.

            They all knew but tried not to talk about it. When it came up, Caite looked at the ground.

            The lamp on side table flickers and Caite stares at it with wide eyes. She knows because the gas station's price has soared that it's only a matter of time before the power goes out for good. She holds her breath like it will cup the electricity and trick it into expanding like a reservoir. Its daylight. It's a waste to keep the lights on and the shades drawn, she knows, but her mother pointed out it hardly mattered. If they used it, if they didn't, the power would still drain. It would still eventually run out. The power plant has no one to man it, everyone waits at home.

            The light bulb pops, and burns the glass black across one side.

            "Fuck," says her mother. Caite sighs, " _language_ ," because someone has to.

\------ 

            "We're gonna go on our date." Caite says on Emme's doorstep. Her face is ruddy and hair a mess of frizzy curls from the rough bush of summer and the pent up determination she conjured from somewhere on the way over. Control has slipped from her fingers in everything, but this is something she can grasp here and now. "We're going to do it right now."

            Willowy Emme is still in her pajamas. Her pants are bright blue with fuzzy monkeys clinging to stars. She blinks out at the late morning light like it is an alien thing. "The power's out."

            "I know." Caite couldn't have helped but notice. Every house on the block is dark. Shades are drawn against the windows but even the edges of the curtains look muted without the artificial glow of electricity to back them up. Tonight everyone will start rationing candles. Tomorrow they will have to learn how to make them. Caite pushes past Emme, throwing a careless arm around the girl's shoulders even though she has to reach up to do so. It's barely comfortable, but it's contact they both need and it helps her draw Emme back through her house and up the stairs. If they are going to do anything, Emme will need to be dressed.

            "The power's out." Emme intones again. Her drawn curtains collect gloom in the corners and shallows of her white, white room. The green gingerbread trim has gone from mint to a murky swamp glow. Caite combs her room with her eyes, cataloging what's changed in the past five days. Emme's bed is unmade. Her stuffed animals have been rescued from the closet or the attic. Just three months before her fourteenth birthday, Emme had claimed that she was too old for stuffed animals. Now it looks as though Emme has foregone the bed and started sleeping on the floor surrounded by a fuzzy guard. Her stuffed animals stand in a circle in the center of the room facing outwards towards the walls and the bed. There are discarded blankets in the center.

            Caite places herself carelessly across Emme's bedspread and tries to ignore the shakes that filter down her spine. She's noticed the same tremble runs along Emme's fingers. They roared through her mother that morning as she watched the lights flicker on and off. It's not illness-- _its fear_. "Does it matter?"

            Emme shrugs before turning to her closet. She's given in and Caite wonders why she isn't more pleased. "Do you still have that tub of ice cream you saved?"

            "Yeah." A pair of shorts and a t-shirt hit the floor and Emme shucks off her tank top, dropping it in a separate pile.

            "Let's bring that too." Caite glances at Emme, lets her eyes linger a moment on the sharp edges of Emme's shoulder bones, before forcing herself to look away. It's strange to worry about whatever the equivalent to 'gentlemanly' behavior here and now but she does--mostly. Furtive glances at the carved recesses of Emme's body makes her heart stutter, leaves her thinking about flirting with the sun. _Don't look directly at it; do you want to be blind?_ Their first grade teacher had told them and Caite always thought, _maybe I do_. "It's just going to melt anyway."

            "Okay," Emme says, as if this were anything _like_ the date they had been talking about for two months. When Caite looks back this time, Emme's dressed and waiting. Her yellow shirt highlights the circles under her eyes.

            Caite reaches out to take her hand. It doesn't matter that she still isn't sure Emme really likes her like that or not. "We'll have fun. You'll see." She just needs that to be true for an hour.

            From somewhere else in the house Emme's father calls: "Don't go too far." Like they could go more than five miles before hitting the barrier.

            ------

            They don't go to the barrier. Five days ago, their whole class had gone to press their faces against the warm glass and to reach up and up to try to touch the top of the dome. They stacked Pete and Jamie, the two tallest kids, one on top of the other to check but while Pete's fingers smudged a line higher than anyone else's--they didn't touch the top and they didn't find a seam.

            Caite's not sure how the dome came into being. It was just there one day--cutting through town and separating the long stretch of highway that used to cut through the middle. Now the highway goes around, or so they all assume, because even if the cars and tractor-trailers never stayed for long there was always a steady stream. Now the roads are empty, the stores have been mostly abandoned.

            For a date Caite knows a few things _must_ happen but neither of them have money or goods to trade and with electricity gone a movie is out of the question. "You want to go to school?" It's the least romantic option but the football field has already started to grow wild around the bleachers and Caite doesn't think anyone else will be there. If they pretend really hard it'll be like they're having a picnic.

            "Yeah, okay." Emme plucks a blade of grass from beside her legs and shreds it between her fingertips while Caite holds the ice cream from the bottom as though to present it to the world. It might as well be the last of its kind.

            They turn on the balls of their feet and start marching up the street in the opposite direction. The school is only about a mile away. Its windows were broken out by older kids' days ago and now it stares, toothless, out onto the empty road.

            When they reach the school, they pluck down on the football field. It used to be the center of class activity and now it feels like the center of the universe. The fact they can take both their school and universe over in some small way is a heady thought to Caite and almost makes up for the silence as they eat ice cream with their fingers. Chocolate has never tasted so good or bitter as it drips through their fingers. It ends up slathered across their mouths and forces out giggles when they try to feed each other. "Not like that." Emme tells Caite, but when she tries, she smears three fingers down the corner of Caite's mouth because they both are moving too much.

            "Oh, like this?" And Emme gets finger-press freckles all across her cheeks.

            There's a smattering of chocolate on the edge of Emme's shirt by the time Caite flops backwards into the grass. The ice cream tub is still half-full but it's all melted now and seems a waste. "You know what I wanted?" She asks, looking up and trying to memorize the flush, the smile, the war painted ice cream on Emme's face. Caite wonders if Emme does the same to her but Emme's back to playing with the grass and Caite tries not to let that bother her.

            "What?" Emme's tries to bend the grass into a whistle. Before she had braces, she had a gap between her two front teeth and could make the grass sing. Now she hardly ever smiles and the only whistling is the sound of air moving past her lips. "You wanted a lot of things."

            It's true, but most of those things were daydreams. Going to New York. Seeing famous people. "I wanted to take you to the movies like we talked about. My mom would've driven." Becoming a star. Internet notoriety. Caite reaches out and spreads her fingers, waiting until Emme drops the grass to thread their fingers together. The chocolate makes them stick. It'd be disgusting except there's nothing they can do about it. "I'd take you to the movies," She continues. "And afterwards we'd share French Fries and I'd let you put mustard on all of them even though I hate it."

            "No you wouldn't." Emme laughs at her and Caite squeezes their hands together tighter, lips forming a stubborn pout. "I would."

            "You _wouldn't_."

            "I _would_."

            Caite feels the flush on her cheeks and tries not to be angry, because it all feels so normal and she wants to swallow the air and bottle it in her chest. "I would." She says again, quietly.

            "You wouldn't," Emme tells her, "'cause I would put it on the side so we could share and it wouldn't get in your chili sauce."

            That's so phony that Caite snorts and reaches up to grab Emme by the straps of her shirt and drag her back down onto the grass. Emme folds and twines her hair in the weeds. "We're such liars," she snorts, pressing her face into Caite's stomach. Caite nods, solemn, as she feels Emme's breathe ghost through her shirt.

            "Probably."

            That doesn't seem like such a bad thing to her.

            ------

            They're there maybe an hour, twisting sticky fingers in each other's hair and complaining there's no clouds to watch or that talking about clouds seemed far more romantic in the movies. They grew up in an age of mass media, TV shows, and video games. The lack of them made the quiet of generations past go from a romantic ideal to hellish in less than a day.

            "It's like that time we turned off the lights and used candles," Emme reminds Caite. "We didn't even last a half-hour."

            Now they had to last indefinitely.

            Caite kicks her heel against the ground, still flat on her back, and starts considering breaking into the school. She's halfway to asking Emme what she wants to do when she hears a rustle coming from the right and she freezes--leg in the air and a chill curling up her shoulder. There hasn't been any violence at the school or in their part of town, not really, but her throat catches anyway.

            Everyone knows people lose their sense when cities are cut off. Everyone's seen the news.

            "What's that?" Emme whispers and her eyes are wide.

            Caite shakes her head. "Dunno."

            There's a moment when she thinks about straightening to look up over the grass, another one where she considers pushing herself to her feet and running straight on towards the crackling sound of snapping twigs. Whoever's there is big and heavy. Whoever's there sounds _scary_ in a way Caite doesn't want to admit to. She's always thought herself a hero but as she listens to the scuffle _stomp_ surrounding them she thinks about vandals and monsters and waivers. For a long moment, it's just the two of them twined together and tense listening to a series of skulking confederates ready to rip them apart.

            Then the sounds stop and a voice rings out: "I think they're really here!" And someone else answers, "What, couldn't be anyone else? Like other students?"

            "Other students?" The first voice laughs and tension drains between Caite and Emme and leaves them boneless in the grass. If Caite is hiding a little wetness at the corner of her eyes, Emme doesn't say anything--but then her own eyes are closed as if in prayer and her chest heaves downward as she breathes out relief.

            They'd know those voices anywhere. Caite barks out a laugh that's more than a little choked and thrusts a fist towards the sky, "Jamie, Pete. Over here."  Because both boys are as subtle as cinder blocks and would have found them anyway.

            "What are you both doing out here?" Jamie is a lumbering boy--thick skinned with a heavy brow and a crew cut. He's more than six-foot and wide enough that if the town hadn't been quarantined everyone would already be clamoring to know what school he's going to play football at. When they were kids, Emme called him a refrigerator and the word has never suited him more. "It's dangerous."

            "Oh yeah?" Caite doesn't bother to move, she twines her hands in Emme's long hair and plucks out bits of ground. "And why are you here?"

            "Emme's sister said you had ice cream." Pete probably weighs more in sweat than muscle and his dirty blond hair clings to his cheeks and cuts into his eyes.

            "Savannah?" Emme perks up at that, pushing herself upright with her arms. "She's here too?"

            "Yeah." Pete jerks a finger towards the school, "She's just checking to see if she can get into her English classroom. She thinks she left a book there."

            " _You let her go alone_?" Emme's on her feet in an instant and Caite scrambles to follow, reaches out to grab onto the edge of Emme's shorts for leverage and fails.

            "It's cool." Pete insists while Jamie backs up a step. "No one else was there."

            "How do you know?" Emme demands, offering Caite a hand without looking. Caite takes it gratefully; her limbs feel heavy and soft from the sun. "Someone could have been inside there!"

            "She's right." Caite is nothing if not supportive and Jamie shakes his head.

            "No, we checked."

            Then ever-helpful Pete, "We looked through the window."

            Caite wonders if either honestly think that's going to calm Emme down. She's reed stiff and her hands have curled into fists so tight Caite can see her knucklebones. Savannah skipped two grades and what she had in smarts she lacked in social _anything_. If anyone could stumble into something terrible it's a knobby kneed twelve year old who once locked herself in a closet at the mall. "I'm going to get her."

            "Going to get who?" Savannah is gape toothed and sulking as she rounds a set of bleachers whose back faces the gym. Her hands are free, apparently, her book wasn't there or was never there to begin with, and her knee is scabbed over from a fall just a few days before. Where Emme is an inkblot painting, her sister is made of light browns. They've shared nothing but a skin complexion since Emme got braces. "Did you take the ice cream?" She asks, as though oblivious to Emme's rising frustration.

            Caite smothers a laugh by pressing her lips together.

            "What are you even doing hanging out with these two?" Emme gestures to Pete and Jamie who try to look offended.

            "Hey--"

            "--We didn't--"

            "They were looking for you." Savannah rolls her eyes, spots the ice cream tub and starts making a beeline for it with swishing hips and an air of entitlement. "I _told them_ you were with Caite." She says like that should mean something to either boy but both look a little dumbfounded.

            "Yeah--" Jamie starts and Pete continues, "But how were we supposed to...suppose to... you know. _Know_?"

            "Urgh." Caite kicks her sneakers against the ground and kicks up a clump of grass. "It doesn't matter now." But it does, in its own way, even though Emme is looking back at her with appreciation. Even the knock off date Caite thought they had feels ruined to her now and it's hard not to be disappointed. Everything else was wrong; this was supposed to be right.

            Behind them Savannah finally picks up the tub and whines, "Oh, no--it's all melted!"

            Emme, unable to resist, walks the few feet over to her little sister and tips the tub until a stream of warm milky chocolate dribbles all down her front. She looks at Pete, Jamie, and then finally back at Caite. "It's always going to be my sister."

            Caite thinks she understands but isn't positive. She _does_ understand when Savannah shoves her hand into the bucket, takes out a handful of liquid cream, and shoves a hand against Emme's chest in a fit of childish revenge.

            She'd have done the same.

            ------

            There's nothing else to do but make a mess of things once the date has already been ruined. Pete and Jamie and Savannah are there. Even if they leave, Caite and Emme can't go back to what they were doing before. It's over.

            So instead, they use what's left of the ice cream to ruin each other's clothes. Soon after, the game is no longer about rubbing chocolate into cotton and more about just chasing each other around until they are breathless and shrieking. For that moment, it feels like any other evening on any other day, as the sun starts to set over an outcrop of trees and the old school building.

            Caite swings to the right and out of Jamie's reach, breathless and red-faced. Ten feet away Emme is running away from Savannah--mouth open wide in a delighted scream as her little sister chases her, hands covered in the remains of warm ice cream.

            Caite loves Emme's simple planes. Standing there as the sun sets Emme curves around Pete, shouting for Jamie to save her. It's a free-for-all, the ice cream mostly forgotten and spilling out on the matted down grass somewhere to their left, but they're still tame enough to shout and laugh and carry on. It's these moments that made Caite love her--the loud laugh, the low dip of her hips and small curves. Emme should have been a cheerleader, the student body president. Watching makes Caite feel strange and oblong--all out of proportion. Her chest hurts, air refuses to come, and Caite's not sure if its love or longing or the strange way her body has yet to settle.

            She's not sure when she hit the ground but all of a sudden the grass is cutting into her knees and she's not sure if she's laughing or sobbing. Air puffs her chest in stuttering waves until she feels like she's gasping. The world turns to a prickling moment of green grass and football players. She thinks, _maybe all of this was a dream_ as her eyes burn and her tongue swells until its too big for her mouth. Somewhere beyond her Emme is still playing and Caite wants to ask her, _Is it the same for you_? But that seems so unfair. _Do you really want me?_ It took so long to dig that smile up from wherever Emme buried it.

            It might as well have been forever or never but all of a sudden, Emme is in front of her, cupping her hands under Caite's chin and frowning into her face, "Caite?"

            Caite never noticed the way Emme's nose had dip right in the middle before. She tries to chuckle and it turns into a cry. She can't stop shaking. It's the trembling lurch she saw before in everyone else and now she can't swallow it down. "Come on, Caite." Emme brushes her thumb under Caite's eyes and Caite is surprised. She didn't think she was crying but the wetness is there. The moment wavers, unreal. It's a dream because Emme's right there. It's a nightmare because their world is ending and the newscaster said they're all going to die.

            "We'll be okay." Emme says, echoing Caite's words days before. The sun is setting red over the crackle of dry trees and overgrown football field. Beyond Emme's sunburned shoulder are their pock-faced classmates covered in the sticky residue of melted ice cream. They shout, distracting Savannah, and Caite smiles even though it feels tight against her cheeks.

            "We will." She agrees in a sigh and lets Emme wrap her arm around her shoulders to help her back to her feet. When Caite looks up again she sees another day is ending and tries not to renew the prickling panic. Instead, she cleaves into the Emme and pretends she isn't thinking about how well they fit together or how hard it still is to breathe. "This wasn't terrible?" She asks, and it sounds almost bitter but Caite feels small and torn. The whole thing feels like a wreck to her. It wasn't like in the movies at all.

            She couldn't fix even that.

            "You got my favorite ice cream." Emme whispers, though they both know that's a lie. "And I would have gone on a date with you anywhere."

            For the first time in a long time, Caite feels her heart settled in her chest. "Would not." She says because she has to.

            "Sure would." Emme sniffs indelicately. "We were always going to have a first date, you know. Just... this one was more special."

            And she sounds so sure that Caite ducks her head because it costs too much to agree. Across on the other side of the field Pete, Jamie, and Savannah have taken to baking on the bleachers. When they join them it's to hoots and jeers but the ribbing is gentle and the trimmers in Caite's hands and chest have stopped.

            It will be two more years before they break straight through that wall and into the unknown.


End file.
